Image Processing Toolbox 7.0

Spatial Transformations and Image Registration

Spatial transformations modify the spatial relationships between pixels in an image and are useful for tasks such as rotating an image, creating thumbnails, correcting geometric distortions, and performing image registration. Image Processing Toolbox supports common transformational operations, such as resizing, rotating, and interactive cropping of images, as well as generalized transformations for arbitrary-dimensional arrays.

Image registration is important in remote sensing, medical imaging, and other applications where images must be aligned to enable quantitative analysis or qualitative comparison. Using Image Processing Toolbox, you can interactively select points in a pair of images and align the two images by performing a spatial transformation, such as linear conformal, affine, projective, polynomial, piecewise linear, or local weighted mean. You can also perform image registration using normalized 2D cross-correlation.

Choosing control points to register an aerial photo to an orthophoto. The Control Point Selection Tool helps you select landmark points and align images (result, bottom). Color aerial photo (top left) courtesy of mPower3/Emerge. Grayscale orthophoto (top right) courtesy of MassGIS.